21 October 2002

Kirby Reverberation KIRBYCOM -- Although I have coffee and exchange development notes with Tim Kirby several times a week, his blog often takes our mutual paths into even higher orbits, like posting Movable Type from Radio. We've discovered we don't have to tell each other what we're doing because our RSS Explorers keep us abreast what we need to know about each other. Some might think that's freaky, especially in Ireland where everyone chats about everything. But for me, I like the economy of time I get in trusting Radio to tune into noise I need to hear. You cannot always depend on human memory to produce the same clarity of expression.

Launch of the Semantic Web ERCIM org -- Tim Berners-Lee and Eric Miller launch the Semantic Web by publishing ERCIM News from the European Research Consortium for Informatics and Mathematics. The October 2002 edition contains no fewer than 26 articles which are all available online here. "A Few Words about the Semantic Web and its Development in the ERCIM Institutes" by Jérôme Euzenat. "The Semantic Web lifts off" by Tim Berners-Lee and Eric Miller. "Projects and future directions of the Semantic Web" info on the Semantic Web home page.

Gerry McGovern Discovers Mailing Lists Gerry Sighting -- Gerry McGovern discovers mailing lists. "Subscription allows you to regularly communicate with your target readers. It allows you to establish an ongoing relationship. It is a highly efficient and cost-effective way of making sure that your message is reaching its target." [OLDaily]

SearchKing Sues Google for Top Rankings LAW MEME -- SearchKing, a company that charges money for artificially inflating its customers' Google rankings, is suing Google for having fixed its algorithm such that SearchKing's googlebombing doesn't work anymore. SearchKing claims that Google purposefully reduced "SearchKing and its related web sites' rankings has damaged the company's reputation and diminished its value." For a company in the business of artifically boosting PageRank scores and selling ads whose price is based on the boosted PageRank, this takes a lot of nerve. SearchKing is asking for a preliminary injunction (this marks the first time LawMeme has seen a legal document with a "your ad here" banner attached). The King does have a point: when your "business" consists of shoplifting and the corner store installs a security camera, you're going to go out of business quickly enough that an injunction is your only hope. On a similar note, Nigerian 419 scammers are planning a class-action suit against the FTC for telling people how their scam works. [LawMeme]

Support for Head Tags and ETags Dave Winer -- There's support for HEAD requests in Radio's aggregator but it hasn't been released yet. Dave is thinking seriously of not releasing it at all and instead going with ETag support. Simon Fell has an excellent and brief Busy Developer's Guide to ETags. They're etter than the HEAD-based protocol, because they only require one call to the server. This gives servers who are getting pounded by aggregators a really clean way to respond.

Blogs Ponder the Washington Sniper WIRED -- Blogheads are discussing who is the sniper? says blogbytesman. Noah Shachtman writes in Wired that "conspiracy theories have long been an Internet staple. But a dearth of evidence about the sniper -- and the phenomenal explosion of blogs -- have brought (4860 pages of) online speculation to a screeching crescendo."

Students Can Lease to Buy PowerBook Computers XI BLUE -- When Apple's Ireland team visited Xi Blue, there was some coffee chat about the iStudent programme running at Apple UK. As Tim Kirby explains, it's a flexible lease rental programme that offers an opportunity to lease an iBook and PowerBook computers for a one, two or three years with an option to buy the equipment for a nominal fee of just £50, after the term expires. Students are offered the option to purchase an AirPort card and/or an AirPort Base Station; the AppleCare Protection Plan, which gives you up to three years of Apple-certified service and support, is also included.

Topics Leading People to Topgold's Blog BALLYBLOG -- Web server logs for the past week show an even spread among four specific pages on this blog. Each of the following pages gets a minimum of 22 individual views coming from search engines (90% Google). People are looking for Gianni Jacklone or Britney Spears (hey! maybe there's a connection?), Treasury Holdings losing their name, PVR or Tsunami QuickBridge.

Blog Your Projects Mark Pilgrim -- Look at this Projects Weblog set up so each project now has its own blog and RSS feed. [dive into mark]

Gianni Jacklone Fills the Frame BALLYBLOG -- Just around the time that O'Reilly and Associates were holding the first Mac OS X Conference in early October, I started getting a couple people a day visiting this blog to see Gianni Jacklone. (In fairness, half of the people visiting my stuff about Gianni have come to read about Britney's Lesbian Lust.) I linked to Gianni's OS X "it's the bomb" because his tall chiseled frame is there for the ladies. Jacklone has tech cred, but credit Apple for silently winning substantial converts from the Unix and Linux world on the back of OS X capabilities.

PIMs for Everyone OSA FOUNDATION org -- The Open Source Applications Foundation has an interesting project involving PIMs for everyone.The OSAF spec includes wxWindows/wxPython Python Zope (ODB) Jabber RDF Mozilla [Marc's Voice]

What is it about Blogspace? BLOGSPACE -- I really want to see an RSS feed from Glenn Fleishman, but like in other cases, I cannot get my news aggregator to pull info from Blogspace. Maybe it's a UserLand-Blogspace thing. Maybe Blogspace is slow. Maybe I'm not fast enough. Anyway, Glenn has an excellent piece in The Seattle Times about why programmers use Powerbooks and it's more persuasive than the Switch ads.

Intelligent Cooking through Flat Screen Videos EPICURIOUS -- How about cooking videos from Epicurious playing on a pull-down touchscreen in your kitchen? You would need a 10" screen running a full screen video with hotspots that can activate ingredient lists, cooking details and ordering information. [John Robb's Radio Weblog and Marc's Voice]